Mario Balotelli joined Liverpool for £16m from AC Milan on this day in 2014 – having previously played for Manchester City and Inter Milan
“I think we have done a really smart piece of business here. This transfer represents outstanding value for the club.”
On the face of it, Mario Balotelli should have been everything Liverpool needed. In reality however, it turned out to be the complete opposite.
Sure, Balotelli had ‘baggage’, but £16m for a 24-year-old striker whose goals had already helped win domestic titles in Italy and England seemed like shrewd business.
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In the end, the Reds settled for Balotelli. It proved to be a disastrous call. Brendan Rodgers was renowned for his man-management skills, but managing the Italian proved to be a step too far even for him.
Rodgers insisted the club had done their due diligence over Balotelli and had received the assurances they wanted over his behaviour and commitment to the cause, with his agent Mino Raiola stressing the player himself knew he was in something of a ‘last chance saloon’.
“At the top level, yes”, Raiola admitted. “It’s either make or break now. If it goes wrong? Mario is 24 years old. He no longer has the alibi of his age. Now it’s up to him. Another flop is inadvisable.”
But four goals in 28 appearances across all competitions ended up being a meagre return and all the promises Balotelli made to the manager in his office prior to signing about knuckling down and committing to the team ethic were quickly broken.
And it didn’t take long for the Italian’s team-mates to start losing patience with him as one anecdote from Liverpool’s Premier League trip to Queens Park Rangers in mid October illustrates how the situation was unravelling.
“He barely moved”, one player told the Athletic. “A lot of the lads caned him but there was very little comeback other than a few scowls and ‘f*** you.’
“He didn’t try to justify anything or tell anyone else what they could be doing better. That’s always a sign that he’s not really thinking or interested.”
A succession of pitiful excuses meant he regularly missed training at Melwood, he disrupted sessions while he was there, failed to learn the names of key first-team players and Rodgers’ patience with him had snapped long before May 2015.
Rodgers, in his defence, openly admitted following his sacking at Liverpool that he did not have the last word on transfers at the time and the call to bring Balotelli to Anfield was not his.
They were thinking that maybe he is a £50m player that we can get for £16m. So, when the owners are wanting you to go down that route and there is no other options, then of course you give it a go.”
Anfield icon Steven Gerrard, whose 17th and final season at Liverpool coincided with Balotelli’s, spoke in his autobiography about how even from the start he had his doubts over whether his presence at Anfield could ever work out.
“In my last season, Brendan Rodgers came to me at Melwood one day in mid-August”, Gerrard recalled. “We had a chat on the training pitch. He said, ‘You know we’ve missed out on a couple of signings. I’m basically left with no option but to have a bit of a gamble.’
“Brendan paused before he spoke again: ‘The gamble is Mario Balotelli.’ My instant reaction was, ‘Uh-oh.’ I’d never met Balotelli but I’d heard all the stories about the indoor fireworks and Jose Mourinho describing him as an ‘unmanageable’ player.
“I could see that, in the right mood, he was a quality footballer but the rest of his career seemed like a spectacular waste of talent. That was my opinion of Balotelli.
“But I also had to admit that, when he played for Italy, he seemed able to switch on his gift like he was snapping on a bright light. When he scored the winner against England in the 2014 World Cup a month earlier he showed all the movement which made him so difficult to mark at his best. I told Brendan that, up close to him on the pitch, you could see that he was a big, powerful guy.
“Brendan must have sensed my underlying reservations because he spoke a little more about why he thought it could be worth the risk. Brendan implied that Balotelli didn’t have anywhere else to go — and it seemed as if Liverpool would be Balotelli’s last chance to shine at a major club. He would be offered a strict contract. Any bad behaviour would be punished.
“I reminded myself that I had always allowed every new player to come into the club with a clean slate. Balotelli’s reputation tested that resolve but I tried my best to be open-minded.
“After his promising debut against Tottenham he had lapsed in training and the subsequent games. His demeanour was very poor. I made up my mind pretty quickly after that about Balotelli.
“There was no friction between us. We got on fine. I still tried to help him and I kept looking for chances to praise him. But I could see Mourinho had been right when he said Balotelli is unmanageable.
“He is very talented with the potential to be world class, but he’ll never get there because of his mentality and the people around him. Balotelli’s always late, he always wants attention, he says the wrong things on social media.
“For me, he doesn’t work hard enough on a daily basis. You’re always fighting a losing battle with Balotelli. He does too many things wrong.”
And Gerrard was right to have his reservations as former Reds forward Rickie Lambert explained last year how the forward did not take training seriously and would ‘ruin the session’ when he got the chance to.
He said: “Brendan Rodgers brought in Mario Balotelli and put him in ahead of me, and it done my head in to be honest. I couldn’t understand.
“The way he used to train was a disgrace. Off the training pitch he’s quite infectious, a lovely lad. But his persona on the training pitch is not good.
“When he played he did try, and I have come across players with that attitude before, but they are usually good enough to get away with it, but he wasn’t.
“I just didn’t understand how Rodgers was letting him get away with it, and picking him ahead of me. It affected me directly, but it had a negative impact on the team.”
“What we wanted and what we needed was a player who could really press at the top end of the field,” he revealed.
“It wasn’t just a goalscorer we were after. I felt Mario was someone who wouldn’t work for us. But come the end of the summer, we were struggling to get someone who could do the role we wanted. I think the ownership group thought that this could be a player I could develop.
left Anfield to join Barcelona for £75million in 2014 but that hunt proved to be rather problematic.
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